Jane Eyre in Sydney

 A new adaptation of Jane Eyre is being performed these days in Sydney, Australia:

Jane Eyre

By Charlotte Brontë

Adapted by Ali Bendall

Directed by Ali Bendall

Cast

Jane Eyre Kyra Belford-Thomas

Rochester Vincent Andriano

Mrs Fairfax Jenny Jacobs

Helen Burns Laura Edwards

Adele Julia Grace

Genesian Theatre Company

420 Kent Street, Sydney, NSW

Season: 5th Oct - 10th Nov 2024

Preview night 4th Oct

Friday and Saturday nights at 7.30pm

Sunday matinée at 4.30pm

Jane Eyre, small, poor and plain, but passionate, intelligent and with a strong moral compass, serves as our narrator and protagonist. Orphaned as a baby, Jane struggles through her loveless childhood - bullied by her only living relations, sent off to Lowood School - an institution for Orphans. Jane becomes an educated but restricted lady of Victorian Society.

Finally, advocating for herself, she becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall where she begins to live, truly live. Here she meets someone who may be able to match her spirit, the brooding Mr Edward Rochester. But what secrets does Thornfield Hall hold?

An entertaining take on the classic Gothic Novel, complete with romance, mystery and a Janean sprinkle of wit.

A love story it is not and never was

Christa Aykroyd has also something to say about the Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights project in The Yorkshire Post (among other Brontë recent events):

Finally, after decades a plaque commemorating my three beloved sister authors 200 miles away from where they were born now spells their name correctly, thanks to a Yorkshire woman every bit as tenacious as the siblings ever were. And for those who think it is unimportant your name is everything. It is who you are.
As a journalist often helping others take their first steps into a profession I love it is the first thing I teach. No matter how accurate your quotes, no matter how inspiring the story you may write, the most important thing to get right is a person’s name.
That may seem pretty obvious but even the most common name needs checking. Get it wrong and the person who has given you their time and told their story is undermined, left feeling inconsequential. (...)
No matter that when their father left Ireland to study at Cambridge he left a Brunty.
No matter that there are theories about why he should change his name which range from the fact his broad Irish accent meant it was written as Bronte (without the dots) by mistake or that it was simply snobbery.
Or hat he changed the name as that was Nelson’s chosen title. It was the name he passed onto his children. When he added the dots known as diaereses (who knew) .. no one knows. Possible to show that the ‘e’ is pronounced. No matter. It is the name his children bore.
And for more than 80 years it has been wrong. The plaque in question lies among the great and famous in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey. There is no doubt Charlotte in particular would have been thrilled to have been commemorated right alongside Shakespeare.
She would have been less pleased that the diaereses were missing. She was a stickler for correctness was our Charlotte.
Of course she and her sisters had spent their writing years hiding behind the pseudonym Bell. Not because they were ashamed of who they were, quite the opposite.
But because they wanted to disguise their gender, knowing as Charlotte put it that as women they would meet prejudice and judgement.
And of course she was absolutely correct. When their true identity was revealed that is exactly what happened. Emily took her new found fame badly. Anne never lived long enough to enjoy it.
And it was Charlotte alone that was left unveiled to be feted in society as the author of Jane Eyre. The name Brontë died with her and her siblings.
All the more important that Yorkshire author and scholar Sharon Wright brought the misspelling to the attention of the Abbey and that they corrected it last week.
Now to other Brontë related matters that are potentially not so uplifting. Hollywood is (again) getting its hands on my favourite book of all time Wuthering Heights. No bad thing in theory.
Too often the story has been portrayed as a hopeless love story, when indeed it is a story of class, or rootlessness and of prejudice.
Too often the story ends with the death of its wayward heroine Catherine when that is only half the tale. But I do not await Hollywood’s latest blockbusting plans with much hope.
The female lead Margot Robbie is statuesque, blonde, Australian and 34. Catherine Earnshaw is very much a native of the West Riding, brown haired and died aged 18 or so. The male lead will be played by Jacob Elordi (Saltburn) who might be the right age (Heathcliff was around 40 when he died) but he is white and again Australian.
Heathcliff was almost certainly of mixed ethnicity and of unknown heritage. And that is the whole point of the story. Which appears to have been missed.
I know both are established actors. I know both will be called upon to ‘act’ but with the best will in the world they have been chosen to add a little sparkle to a story which is anything other than sparkly. I also know I will watch the film when it comes out.
But please, I beg Hollywood and the film’s producer Emerald Fennell not to dish up the same old telling. A love story it is not and never was. And I am dreading even more the possibility of mock Yorkshire accents full of dropped vowels and added t’s.
Wuthering Heights, like it’s writer, was born out of Yorkshire. It is as guttural as the accent of its servant inhabitant Joseph. It is as dark as the skin of its main character, as dank as the rain that lashes the moors. It must not be shiny and bright.
Only then will Emily Brontë’s true genius shine through as rugged as the “eternal rocks beneath “ as Cathy describes her love for Heathcliff.
I await the production with interest, but with some trepidation. I would be happier if it were rooted as far away from Hollywood as it could be. If it were placed in the genius hands of Sally Wainwright I would know it would work.
Her one hour drama To Walk Invisible, hit the spot perfectly. Because it was far from perfect. Their clothes were stained at their hems, the streets of Haworth were muddied and the shop windows dirtied. Whether we will get the same from Hollywood remains to be seen.
Until then I will just have to rejoice that two little dots at least restore some part of their legacy for all to see. That for now will do nicely.

Prestige, El Tiempo (Colombia), or Jolie Bobine (France) also summarize the alleged cast controversy with no new arguments.  Curiously, Collider makes a list of the best Timothy Dalton movies and Wuthering Heights 1970 comes up:

"You said I killed you—haunt me, then!" With a new Emerald Fennell-directed version on the way, now is a good time to check out the earlier Wuthering Heights adaptations. Set on the wild Yorkshire moors, Emily Brontë's classic story revolves around the doomed love affair between Heathcliff (Dalton) and Catherine Earnshaw (Anna Calder-Marshall), whose relationship is thwarted by class divisions and personal pride.
There have been close to 30 adaptations of the novel and this is one of the better ones. What sets this version apart from many others is its refusal to soften the harsh and often brutal characters of Brontë’s novel, though it still strays from the original, cutting off the story well before the end. Dalton (then just 24 years old) rises to the occasion with a raw and energetic performance, putting his own stamp on the legendary character. Director Robert Fuest explained the character's direction, saying, "We shall show Heathcliff as a man completely fascinated by Catherine's passion, sexuality, jealousy and cruelty."

RTÉ presents an interview with Martina Devlin, author of Charlotte, and an extract from the novel:

Martina Devlin’s new novel weaves back and forth through Charlotte’s life, reflecting on the myths built around her by those who knew her, those who thought they knew her, and those who longed to know her. Above all, this is a story of fiction: who creates it, who lives it, who owns it.

Times Now News lists books you "considered to be boring but that are really good":

Jane Eyre

Often mistaken for a simple gothic romance, 'Jane Eyre' is a pioneering work of feminist literature. The novel follows Jane, an orphaned governess who maintains her integrity and independence in the face of hardship. Her relationship with the brooding Mr. Rochester is complex and intense. Brontë's exploration of morality, love, and self-respect makes this a compelling and emotionally rich read. (Girish Shukla)

I Prefer Reading lists several spooky books:

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins
Jane Eyre has never been so delightfully spooky. This modern retelling is told through the different points of view of the two Mrs. Rochesters. One is writing in a makeshift journal, while the other is slowly realizing something is wrong - and nobody will tell her what it is. It's a fascinating look into the two different psyches, and comes to an ending I truly didn't see coming. Overall, I loved it, but it left me terrified of being trapped in an attic with no way of getting out. (Ashley Skolrud)

Amazing Songwriter has a selection of songs written by teenagers:

“Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush

 Kate Bush is quite famous for writing and performing a lot of amazing music when she was still more or less a kid herself. “Wuthering Heights” is the most famous example, as Bush wrote the track at only 18 years old before recording and releasing it in 1978.

It’s an artistic piece of work that is both well-written and sung in quite a unique way. Both of those talents launched Bush into art-pop stardom soon after. (EM Casalena)

You're not alone quotes in Pinkvilla, including one by Charlotte. 

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The Brontës Playing Cards

Do you want to play poker or bridge with the Brontës? Actually, you can:

The Brontës Playing Cards

Illustrated by Eleanor Taylor

Text by Amber M. Adams

Lawrence King

Play cards with the Brontës, from their friends and family to their most famous characters. From Cathy and Heathcliff to Patrick Brontë and Aunt Branwell. This playing card deck features 54 of the Brontës' most memorable characters as well as family and friends, learn all about them in the accompanying booklet.

54 CARD DECK: A set of playing cards featuring illustrations of the Brontës' family, friends and famous characters. Features standard playing card suits, numbers and court cards. Suits are themed on each sibling with hearts for Charlotte, clubs for Emily, diamonds for Anne and spades for Branwell.

BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED by Eleanor Taylor, bestselling illustrator of The World of the Brontës and The World of Virginia Woolf.

ACCOMPANYING BOOKLET includes background about the Brontë sisters and their brother Branwell, their novels and their most memorable characters written by former Brontë Studies Editor-in-Chief, Amber M. Adams.

EASY HANDLING: The cards will not crack or bend when shuffled or flexed due to their weight. Held within a box these cards are perfect for taking anywhere on the go.

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A house, a film and the last Classics major

Halifax Courier reports that the former home of Dr Phyllis Bentley (who also wrote about the Brontës) and where Patrick Brontë also lived for a while is now for sale.

The Grange and Coach House is a stone-built Grade II listed period residence set within established mature grounds, offering the unique proposition of purchasing the main detached home along with a one to two bedroomed detached stone build coach house.

Previous occupants of The Grange have included writer Dr Phyllis Bentley and Patrick Brontë, father of the writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, and of Branwell Brontë. (Abigail Kellett)

Time features the story behind the film The Outrun.

Not long after her memoir was published in 2016, Liptrot was approached by numerous filmmakers about securing a movie option for her recovery tale. “It was something I thought quite seriously about: Is this a process that I want to enter into?” Liptrot says. “I remember going for a long walk and considering it all.” She ultimately perked up when eventual producer Sarah Brocklehurst sent her a love letter about the book, offering some ideas about how to adapt it and sharing some movie references, including Andrea Anrold’s Wuthering Heights and the Scottish film Movern Callar, to describe her vision. “The other thing that she was quite clear on was that she would like me to be involved in the process,” Liptrot says. (Jake Kring-Schreifels)

The Lawrentian reports that the last Classics major at Lawrence University is expected to graduate this coming spring.

This year will be a monumental one for Lawrence’s humanities department; senior Delia Lipkin, our university’s last Classics major, is expected to graduate this coming spring. A long string of happy coincidences led her to Classics, a major that she described as antiquated because of the ambiguous nature of the term “classics” — they’re a little farther back than Jane Eyre, she joked — explaining it instead as a field of study on the history, culture, art and beyond of the ancient Mediterranean. (Blair Vandehey)

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Critical Coalitions

 A new scholarly brook with Brontë-related content:

Critical Coalitions: Literary Aesthetics and Beyond

Edited by Rimika Singhvi and Gunja Patni

Cambridge Scholar Publishing

ISBN13: 978-1-0364-0764-3

September 2024

Step into a thought-provoking world to explore the dynamic interplay of literary aesthetics and some of the key contemporary themes of postcoloniality, posthumanism, the female body, gendered geographies, myth and new media, cinema, and literature. While the first three sections of the book foster a dialogue amongst scholars and practitioners to examine how literature engages with and shapes our understanding of these multifaceted themes, the next two extend the discussion through no-holds barred interviews and poignant poetry-contributions that add depth and texture, offering fresh perspectives on culture, identity, and representation. With each turn of the page, discover the transformative power of literature in today’s globalized landscape.

The book includes the chapter:

Reclaiming Bodies and Beauty: Interrogating Eurocentric Ideals in Wide Sargasso Sea and The God of Small Things.

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On not having actually read Wuthering Heights (again)

Even a professor speaking candidly about his experience is now deemed controversial. From The Mary Sue:

At one point, Dames laments that his first-year students now commonly list Percy Jackson as their favorite book, whereas past students would list Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. While some readers also lamented the phenomenon, others questioned whether students enjoying Percy Jackson was genuinely problematic. [...]

While The Atlantic article highlighted some genuinely concerning details about reading comprehension in college students, social media users are likely correct that liking Percy Jackson may not be substantial proof of these issues. Perhaps some of the concern is about appearances rather than the book itself. Dames mentioned his previous students hailing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as their favorite books, but there’s no evidence he asked these students for proof that they ever even read the books. What if these students just listed these books to keep up the appearance of “elite college students”? Perhaps students today are just getting more honest than students of the past and feel less of a need to present themselves as sophisticated, cultured intellectuals just to prove they belong in an Ivy League college. [...]

There does seem to be a shift in reading preferences and comprehension, but not all of these shifts have to be negative. These changes could reflect readers feeling more freedom to read for fun and more confident in establishing their own likes and interests instead of feeling pressure to appear well-read to their peers. Ultimately, writing off students for not sharing one’s sophisticated taste in literature sounds far more detrimental to students’ reading performance than a first-year student liking Percy Jackson. (Rachel Ulatowski)

We thought it was scary the other day. The fact that we have an article defending the fact that a college student's best ever read was Percy Jackson (of which we have no proof either as the columnist says of students in the past) is terrifying.

Business Post contrinues to lament the so-called 'missed opportunity' in the casting of Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights.

In a cultural context where colour-blind casting remains a sensitive issue (see the ongoing hoo-ha around Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Rings, whose final series has just been released), Fennell’s critics point out that it seems bizarre to cast a white actor (Elordi) in a role that, on paper, is arguably a person of colour.

It would have probably been impossible to cast a black actor in the role of Catherine Earnshaw without a backlash: Catherine represents the Victorian landed gentry at a particular point in British history. But Heathcliff, who we meet as a “dark-skinned gipsy” rescued by the Earnshaws from the Liverpool docks – then the centre of the English slave trade – is very clearly a racially ambiguous character.

He is Catherine’s love interest, yes, but his treatment throughout the book – the constant othering, the continual speculation about his origins: “[his] father was Emperor of China, and [his] mother an Indian queen”, one character says, another: calls him “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” – is also representative of imperialist attitudes of the time.

Their competing cultural heritage is an important part of why Catherine and Heathcliff’s love affair is doomed.

Of course, casting decisions also reflect contemporary attitudes, as a brief survey of previous film adaptations of Bronte’s book confirms. In the five English-language film adaptations of Wuthering Heights (there are French, Spanish, Japanese and several Bollywood versions too), Heathcliff has been typically played by famous white men of clear social privilege: Milton Rosmer, Laurence Olivier, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes.

In an infamously awful “musical-comedy” from 1996, Cliff Richard also cast himself as the tortured hero. The exception to this was the 2011 adaptation by Andrea Arnold, in which black actor James Howson was cast as Heathcliff, opening up a long conversation about representation and bias in the British film industry.

Critics accusing Arnold of giving the book an inappropriate “race-lift” were drowned out by supporters, who proved their case about the period piece by drawing on textual and historical evidence that Heathcliff was clearly not Caucasian at all.

In this context, then, Fennell’s casting can be seen as a step backwards, repatriating a character of colour to a problematic whitewashed tradition. But let’s remember: the film hasn’t started shooting, Fennell and her actors have made no public comment; the adaptation may, like her previous films, shed classic inspiration to offer something very different to what an audience might expect.

Even so, it is hard to imagine that reviews, when they come, will not mention the missed opportunity to add a more authentic and inclusive version to the history of this seminal British story. (Sara Keating)

Interesting how an Irish news site won't even contemplate the fact that Heathcliff could be Irish and simply goes with what everyone's saying.

Thought Catalog recommends '7 Gothic Romance Movies That Will Make You Shudder And Sigh'. Wuthering Heights 2011 is given as a bonus recommendation with a bit of secondhand opinion on the side:

I never thought I would write this sentence, but there is unrest in the Gothic romance fan community this week. The famously tall Jacob Elordi has been cast as Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights; however, Heathcliff is described as dark-skinned and of average height in Emily Brontë’s original novel. Guess which part of this is making people mad. (It’s not the height difference.) Also, I thought Elordi was canceled after assaulting that radio producer in February, but maybe the police were just dazzled by his incredible tallness or something because he’s clearly fine. 

Anyway, if y’all want to watch a movie version of Wuthering Heights, then you should just watch the 2011 version in which Heathcliff is actually black, since Emerald Fennell already has enough money. Or you can just watch these seven other gothic romances instead. 

Jane Eyre (2011)

Speaking of the Brontë sisters, Wuthering Heights is not the only adaptation of a Brontë novel that came out in 2011. There was also Jane Eyre, which starred Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska as Edward Rochester and the titular Jane in a misty English landscape populated by exquisite shadows. Elegant, clever, haunting, and – importantly – romantic, the movie did its source novel justice. It will make you alternately swoon and shudder. (Evan E. Lambert)

Wait, what? You're recommending a film on which Bertha is played by an Italian actress when nowhere in the book does it say that she was Italian? Tut-tut, how very disappointing.

Qué Ver (Argentina) recommends an adaptation with a white Heathcliff because it's good.

La novela Cumbres borrascosas (Wuthering Heights) de Emily Brontë es una historia que ha resistido el paso del tiempo. Desde su publicación en 1847, este clásico de la literatura ha sido llevado a la pantalla grande más de una decena de veces, entre la pantalla grande y la televisión. En los próximos años los fanáticos serán testigos de una nueva adaptación que será dirigida por Emerald Fennell, y que contará con las actuaciones de Margot Robbie y Jacob Elordi.

A pesar de la multiplicidad de adaptaciones, es cierto que cada una de ellas destaca por algo en particular, pero es la versión de 1970 dirigida por Robert Fuest, la que ha logrado trascender el paso del tiempo y a menudo es considerada una de las más fieles de la novela de Brontë.

Protagonizada por Anna Calder-Marshall y Timothy Dalton, esta adaptación nos sumerge en un mundo de desatadas pasiones, venganza y amores imposibles. [...]

Fuest y su equipo construyeron un universo visual que sumerge al espectador en la atmósfera opresiva y salvaje de los páramos de Yorkshire. La fotografía de John Coquillon, marcada por contrastes dramáticos y una paleta cromática sombría, refleja la turbulencia interior de los personajes. La mansión de Cumbres Borrascosas, con su arquitectura gótica y sus interiores cargados de simbolismo, se erige como un personaje más, un reflejo de la complejidad psicológica de sus habitantes.

La fidelidad de la película al texto original es otro de los pilares de esta adaptación. Fuest respeta la estructura narrativa de la novela, los diálogos y los temas centrales. Sin embargo, el director logra imprimirle un sello personal, dotando a la historia de una dimensión visual y sonora que la enriquece.

La banda sonora, compuesta por Michel Legrand, es otro de los puntos fuertes del filme, que recibió una nominación al Globo de Oro. Asimismo, la recepción crítica y comercial de la película superó todas las expectativas de la época, convirtiéndose en un verdadero éxito. Sin lugar a dudas, una adaptación que logró capturar a la perfección la esencia de la obra de Emily Brontë, con grandes actuaciones y una historia que continúa más vigente que nunca. (Magela Muzio) (Translation)

Zenda (Spain) has an article on the novel and many related things besides.

The Almanac features local writer Amanda Glaze.

Glaze said she never expected to become an author, but she does have a long history of loving books. A self-described “theater kid” growing up, the Los Altos High School grad loved doing plays with Los Altos Youth Theater. Perhaps not surprisingly, “my favorite ones were all the literary ones,” she said, as she recalled playing heroines such as Jo March, Mary Lennox, Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley. “Obviously the book writer was already coming out, I just didn’t know it yet,” she said. “I eventually got to play all of my favorite book characters.” (Karla Kane)

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Brontë Society AGM 2024 + Annual Lecture with Graham Watson

Just before the AGM, the Annual Lecture of the Brontë Society will take place:

Annual Brontë Society Lecture 2024

Saturday 5 October, 1pm - 2pm (BST)

Adapting the past: the collaboration of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell

by Graham Watson, author of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë.

Tickets: Brontë Society members, free; non-members, £5

Online (Zoom)

Graham Watson is a writer and editor. He grew up in the west of Scotland and studied English literature and language at the University of Glasgow. The Invention of Charlotte Brontë is his first book.

Based entirely on new research and first-hand material, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë reconstructs the last five years in the life of the iconic author. It tells in detail for the first time the extraordinary events that produced Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) and the media scandal that erupted on its publication, resulting in it being banned and rewritten twice in six months. Despite being one of English literature’s most contested biographies, it has influenced everything written on the Brontë family ever since, with a consensus that assumes Gaskell was misled by her sources, rendering the book unreliable.

However, through a forensic examination of Gaskell’s research into Charlotte Brontë’s life, her judicious analysis of conflicting witness testimonies, and an exploration of the aggrieved nature of the challenges Life received which led Gaskell to terminate the scandal it caused by falsely admitting error, Graham Watson demonstrates that the truth about Gaskell’s account cannot be the open and shut case we have always been led to believe.

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A Brontë vibe

Cinema Daily US features Jane Campion's Masterclass at The Museum of Cinema in Turin.

During the Masterclass, Jane Campion claimed her strong appreciation for two literary Emilys that influenced her writing: the author of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson who penned the poem The Heart asks Pleasure first, which gave the name to the song composed by Michael Nyman for the film [The Piano]. (Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi)

The New York Times reviews the play Good Bones at The Public Theater, Manhattan.

This production, directed by Saheem Ali, opens with a Brontë vibe; Aisha wanders in a shift dress through her in-progress modern mansion, with plastic sheets draping down from the high ceilings so the characters move through a haze of construction material. (Don’t worry, the sheets are gradually ripped down throughout the play to expose an Ikea showcase-worthy kitchen and dining room, beautifully designed by Maruti Evans.) The follow-through is a little less impressive. (Maya Phillips)

The Kathmandu Post interviews writer Louisa Kamal.

Has your reading taste evolved as you’ve lived and worked across different cultures?

Definitely. Living in Manchester with my mother was limiting in some ways, as she was strict. Studying in an all-girls school made my childhood conservative as well. During that time, my interest in literature was traditional, too, and I was drawn to 19th—and 20th-century literature penned by the Bronte sisters, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, and others. (Sanskriti Pokharel)

Voice Tribune features local writer Jenny Kiefer.

“Later, as a pretentious teenager, I only read classics or anti-war books, but still gravitated towards darker works like southern gothic or things like [Kurt] Vonnegut and Jane Eyre. I think these works, especially [William] Faulkner, have definitely influenced my writing voice and style.” (Kevin Murphy Wilson)

The News Record lists some 'Books You Should Be Reading This Fall' and one of them is

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 

With almost 2 million ratings on Goodreads, this gothic lit classic is both a favorite of professors and students alike. Centering around the complex character Heathcliff, this decade-long story conquers him seeking revenge on those who kept him away from his true love. Light up a candle and enjoy this tumultuous tale! (Brooke Burkhardt)

The fact that it has 'almost 2 million ratings on Goodreads' is exactly the right reason to read Wuthering Heights, right?

LifeHacker recommends 'The 30 Best Horror TV Shows to Stream Before Halloween' and one of them is

Dark Shadows (1966 – 1971)

Modern TV shows might give you 10 episodes a season but, if you're looking to kill more time than that, there are always the 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows, the popular 1960s soap opera. Starting out as a gothic, Jane Eyre-style tale set among a wealthy but decayed family in a Maine fishing village, the show soon introduced ghosts, a phoenix-lady and, most famously, vampire Barnabas Collins. Always on the hunt for new horrors, the show saw the residents of Collinsport stalked and murdered (and resurrected and murdered again) by updated versions of every classic creature imaginable. There are a lot of episodes, but sticking with it yields the pleasures of the show's increasing and compelling weirdness: Characters alter history by traveling through time, get chased by mystical floating hands, and even visit parallel universes long before Marvel got in on that action. (Ross Johnson)

A contributor to Yahoo!Life tries to write something funny about a few 'Relationship lessons I've learned from Jane Eyre'. Jane Eyre's Library posts about some Jane Eyre adaptations for very, very young readers.

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The Brontë Dogs

An alert for tomorrow, October 4, at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

Parsonage Unwrapped: The Brontë Dogs

An evening talk at The Brontë Parsonage Museum

 Friday 4 October, 7pm - 8:30pm (GMT)

Join researcher and academic, Jane Sunderland, for a Parsonage Unwrapped evening in the library, getting to know the Brontës' dogs.

Using some of the paintings and ‘dog objects’ at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, we'll take a look at what we know (or think we know) about the Brontë family dogs: Grasper, Keeper, and Flossy. We'll also delve into the relationship between the Brontës' real dogs and their fictional creations.

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'Our own civilization is obsessed by sex but bored by yeomen and landowners'

None other than Terry Eagleton himself (of Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës fame) has written an article on the whole Heathcliff debacle for UnHerd: 'Why Jacob Elordi is Heathcliff Slavishly accurate dramatisation is absurd' (it is indeed).

Not many films are panned even before they’ve gone into production. Such has been the fate, though, of yet another version of Wuthering Heights. Already derided as melodramatic trash, some reviewers are wondering whether the director, Emerald Fennell, has actually read the book.

Whether she has or hasn’t, you can’t pluck the tormented love story of Heathcliff and Catherine out of its complex context without inflicting some serious damage on Emily Brontë’s fiction. The novel is about a lot more than love. In its intensely materialist way, it also concerns the conflict between nature and culture, labour and gentility, power and rebellion, struggles over property and inheritance, the relations between the English landowning class and the small farmers or yeomanry, and a good deal more besides. 

How do you put these issues on screen? You can’t. You can tell a story entitled “Cathy and Heathcliff”, but it isn’t what Emily Brontë wrote. Our own civilization is obsessed by sex but bored by yeomen and landowners. The background to the Brontës is the world of poverty, political repression and smouldering social rebellion known as the Hungry Forties. The sisters would have seen a good deal of destitution on their own doorstep, and were alive to the turbulent times in which they lived. They were shrewd, hard-headed, lower-middle-class Yorkshire women, not three weird sisters lost in erotic fantasy in the moorland mists.

Nor is Wuthering Heights what you might call a romance. In fact, you might even call it an anti-romance. The relationship between the two lovers, if you can call it that, is implacably impersonal. There’s a relentless, elemental, even brutal quality to it, which lies much deeper than mere feeling. We are no longer in the mannered world of Jane Austen. Heathcliff is no Hugh Grant but a pitiless exploiter. Beneath his flinty exterior beats a heart of stone. If some readers have been seduced by him, it is because everyone likes a rogue. In his dealings with  Catherine, what Freud calls eros and thanatos, sexuality and the drive for extinction, are impossible to disentangle. Like Jane Eyre, the best-known work of Emily’s sister, Charlotte, the novel is shot through with sado-masochism. If this is love, then there’s nothing in the least pleasant or affable about it. One can’t even speak of it as sexual. It’s more like a fight to the death — an absolute, remorseless, inhuman need for each other with a fierce undertow of violence, one which has little to do with tenderness or affection and perhaps refuses to be placated even in the grave. Almost uniquely, we have a Victorian novel which doesn’t end on a genially upbeat note with that magical solution to all human heartache: marriage.

This is an important milestone in the evolution of the English novel. With the exception of Samuel Richardson’s great 18th-century work Clarissa, which few have read because it’s a million words long, hardly any English novel before Wuthering Heights ends on a tragic note. Even Wuthering Heights is ambiguous in this respect: do Catherine and Heathcliff find fulfilment beyond the grave or not? Then, from the fiction of Thomas Hardy to our own time, the norm becomes a tragic (or at least non-comic) ending. There are a number of reasons for this seismic literary shift, among which is the fact that the Victorians (who lived in perpetual fear of revolution) saw a link between gloom and political disaffection. Part of the purpose of art was to edify its audience, and edified audiences were less likely to tear up the paving stones to build barricades. Charlotte Brontë conforms to this demand in Jane Eyre, blinding and disfiguring Rochester in order to punish his bigamy and bring him, chastened and repentant, to a marriage in which Jane is definitely the boss. Emily bravely refuses this conventional strategy.

Wuthering Heights may tacitly suggest a reason for the strangely asexual nature of the bond between its protagonists. Heathcliff is brought home one night by Cathy’s father and dumped unceremoniously on the family, but he might be “family” even so. He may be old Earnshaw’s bastard child, in which case he and Catherine are half-siblings, and their non-sexual relation springs from an unconscious incest taboo. It’s hard otherwise to see why this gruff yeoman farmer, who doesn’t seem given to spontaneous acts of charity, should give house-room to such an unprepossessing little brat. We shall, alas, never know. Anyway, the intense unity of selves which Catherine and Heathcliff feel, which is hard to speak of as a relationship since relationship implies otherness, works even without this incestuous subtext.

Heathcliff’s ethnic origins are hard to pin down — hence the pearl-clutching at the news of Fennell casting a white actor in the role. Variously labelled as a gypsy, a Lascar or Indian sailor, a Creole, and a Spanish castaway, it’s hard to know how dark he is, or how much of it is pigmentation and how much the fact that he needs a bath. The fact is, his origins are deliberately made obscure, to highlight his status as an outsider in the tight-knit patriarchal community of the Heights. What kind of outsider doesn’t really matter. Whether he comes from Bournemouth or Borneo is less important than the fact that he is cruelly treated, and thus turned into a monster who seeks to wreak vengeance on those who have abused him. As W.H. Auden writes, “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return”. 

Even so, there are a number of clues buried in the story to Heathcliff’s actual identity. One can make a strong case that he is Irish, as Emerald Fennell is to judge by her surname; and whether the Irish are black or white, as well as orange or green, wasn’t clear to the Victorian middle-class mind. They are of course formally “white” — whatever that means — but they were consistently portrayed at the time (in Punch cartoons, for example) as dark, dangerous and chronically rebellious. They were perceived, so to speak, as spiritually dark-skinned, the Blacks of the British isles. 

Why might Heathcliff hail from John Bull’s other island? Well Wuthering Heights was written as the Great Famine was beginning to grip Ireland, resulting in a million dead and a further million driven into exile. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney illustrate, a lot of the latter group ended up in Liverpool, a city to which the Brontës’ ill-starred alcoholic brother Branwell took a trip in 1845 and perhaps reported to his sisters what he had witnessed there. A few months later, Emily began writing her novel. By 1847, 300,000 destitute Irish immigrants had landed in the port. Images of them as starving scarecrows dressed in rags and with an animal-like growth of black hair appeared in various English magazines. Earnshaw picks up off the Liverpool streets “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child” who speaks a kind of “gibberish”. Many of the children who washed up in Liverpool would have been Irish speakers. In fact, the Famine almost dealt the language the coup de grace, since it was spoken mainly by the poor, and the poor were mostly the ones who died or emigrated. The Irish language didn’t in fact die, but nor did it ever fully recover. Most Irish people speak some Irish in the way that most educated English people speak French, i.e. very badly.

Consider, too, the fact that the name “Brontë” was originally “Brunty”, which like most surnames ending in y (aigh in Irish) is an Irish name. The sisters’ Right-wing clerical father Frenchified it in his quest for respectability in England. Brontë country in Ireland isn’t the Yorkshire moors around Haworth but the region of County Down from which Patrick came. When the gin-soaked, stage-Irish Branwell displeased the local people, they burnt an effigy of him with a herring in one hand and a potato in the other. Branwell was a loyal supporter of the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell, leader of the greatest reform movement of 19th-century Europe.

So assuming, therefore, that Heathcliff really is Irish, perhaps it’s fine for a white actor to represent him. But why are we even thinking in these terms? Why cling to such a naive view of dramatic representation? For to think that every aspect of an actor must accurately represent every aspect of the character he or she plays is absurd. Margot Robbie, who will play Catherine, represents her accurately in so far as she’s a woman, but not in so far as she’s quite a bit older than Catherine is in the book. She may also have a differently shaped nose. Nobody imagines that every feature of an actor’s performance is in this sense representational. If an actor trips and falls over, is it an accident? Or is it required by the script?

On this view, then, a black actor can play a white figure because his or her ethnicity need not be representational, any more than their height or weight need be. And white actors can play black individuals because we, the audience, provisionally bracket off their ethnicity and don’t take it as representational. But obviously this means that white actors muscle in on most of the parts. 

Surely, though, ethnicity is too important an issue to be bracketed off. And actors from minorities have been cut a rough deal for far too long. So we should aim for a situation in which ethnic minority actors can play white individuals, which means having their actual skin colour temporarily disregarded by the audience without this constituting a put-down. And, indeed, without the audience thinking they are being told that, say, Julius Caesar or Elizabeth I really were black. It also means white actors being able to play black or brown individuals without the audience seeing imperial overtones. 

For all this to happen, though, we will need change not just in the theatre or film industry but in society at large. And the signs, as the far-Right continues to rise throughout the Western world, are not propitious.

A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature at King's College London contributes a much less thoughtful, more go-with-the-flow article on the matter to The Conversation.

How do you cast Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel about a child so brutalised by his adoptive family that he drives his pregnant love to death? Not, it would seem, like Emerald Fennell, the latest director to attempt it. [...]

But has anybody ever got Heathcliff and Catherine right?

Lawrence Olivier was nominated for an Oscar for playing Heathcliff in 1939, but his clipped, Royal Shakespeare Company gentlemanliness hardly befitted the “savage vehemence” of the role. Heathcliff is an orphan, probably picked up on the Liverpool docks, bullied for looking like “a dark-skinned gypsy”, “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (a lascar was a sailor or militiaman often from Asia). Among his many eventual crimes, he tortures puppies and beats children. But the Olivier movie staged the novel as a classic Hollywood romance.

Until very recently other directors followed suit, cutting the story’s more brutal elements (including most of its second half) and casting dashing (white) leads like Timothy Dalton (1970) and then-newcomer Ralph Fiennes (1992). In the latter film, Juliette Binoche’s Catherine had a notably French accent. (Maybe best not to mention Cliff Richard’s 1996 musical, in which, at 56, he was panned for playing a teenage Heathcliff as a pop idol.)

As the director of a 2011 BBC Radio Three adaptation put it, Wuthering Heights is not supposed to be “a Vaseline-lensed experience”. But it has been mostly sold that way.

Perhaps the only director to capture the nightmarishness of Bronte’s text is Andrea Arnold, who in 2011 cast untrained actors in the central roles, including a black actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff. At the time, some critics even found that decision controversial. But the casting was a turning point, and Arnold’s bleak, almost wordless, adaptation changed the game.

In 2024, audiences are more aware that casting a white actor like Elordi as Heathcliff is not only to undersell the novel as romance, but to wilfully ignore the imperialism in the text.

There is evidence to suggest that Heathcliff’s story was at least partly inspired by a local slave-owning family, the Sills, who, as well as making their money from sugar plantations in Jamaica, had 30 enslaved Africans working on their home estate in Yorkshire.

Also, as mentioned, characters speculate about Heathcliff’s race throughout. For instance, Nelly Dean, Cathy’s family’s servant, wonders whether “[his] father was Emperor of China, and [his] mother an Indian queen.” He is clearly not white.

Still, in going in the opposite direction to Arnold, Fennell’s film might offer us something new.

The novel is difficult to film not only because it depicts human beings at their most primal, but also because it is so strangely told. Brontë rarely shows us Catherine or Heathcliff firsthand. We learn their tale through an uninitiated southerner, Lockwood, who himself hears much of the story from a servant with unreliable passions of her own.

Key scenes in the novel have an emotional realism drawn not only from the rough-hewn Yorkshire rocks but also from gothic melodrama: Catherine’s ghost literally bleeds as it grasps Lockwood through a window; Heathcliff digs up Catherine’s grave just “to have her in my arms again”. If this is realism, it is so extreme it borders on the theatrical.

And this is where Fennell excels. Saltburn’s bathtub scene is infamous for body horror, but mostly it depicts an urgent need to consume and be consumed by another. Saltburn also has its own graveside scene, which clearly echoes Heathcliff’s necrophiliac desires in Wuthering Heights.

I would argue there can be no justification for casting a white actor as Heathcliff, and it is to be hoped that Fennell rethinks this decision. But perhaps there is also something to be gained from having a Heathcliff and Catherine with the glitzy theatricality of Elvis and Barbie. Fennell isn’t going to give us the Catherine and Heathcliff we have come to expect, but it is possible she will evoke the passion the characters deserve. (Adelene Buckland)

At the heart of the matter of what we have seen these days on X, people claiming to know a book by hanging on to just one random line and ignoring many others, is what The Atlantic features in this article: 'The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school'.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. [...]

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot. [...]

Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s reading habits. (The historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite. (Rose Horowitch)

It's scary, really.

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Audacity and Prejudices

A new French book with Brontë-related content:

Audace et Préjugés. Promenade littéraire et féministe avec Austen, Brontë et Woolf

Alexis Karklins-Marchay

Presses de la Cité

ISBN 9782258207660

10/10/2024

Armées de leur plume, elles ont défendu leurs droits et exprimé leur puissance créatrice.

Depuis des siècles, des femmes s’élèvent avec audace contre l’inégalité qui règne entre les genres. Parmi elles, trois autrices anglaises se sont particulièrement distinguées : Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë et Virginia Woolf. En quoi leurs textes sont-ils toujours aussi actuels et percutants, au point que l’on continue de s’en inspirer ?

L’auteur nous invite à une promenade littéraire débutant avec Orgueil et Préjugés, dont l’héroïne affirme son droit à faire un mariage d’amour. Elle se poursuit avec Jane Eyre, qui aspire à l’indépendance, et s’achève avec Une chambre à soi, où Virginia Woolf revendique l’importance de l’intimité et de la créativité pour les femmes.

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'Has she even read the book, people asked. The question is: have they?'

A columnist from The Standard writes 'In defence of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff'.

So far, so good. But news that Elordi had been cast as the great hero of Emily Brontë’s novel, in an adaptation by Emerald Fennell, caused outrage. “He’s too young! Too hot! Too Australian!” people clamoured. Most of all, he’s “too white”.

It is impossible to address this last point without revealing a theory about the plot which constitutes a massive spoiler. So, be warned. It is believed by some critics that Heathcliff is the illegitimate son of his “adoptive” father, the result of a liaison with a woman from overseas. But his ethnicity and origin are kept ambiguous. One character describes him as "a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (a Lascar is a dated and pejorative term for a sailor from Southeast Asia, and not a word we’d recommend using now). At other points, he is called a gypsy (ditto). We also know that he is “dark skinned”.

Heathcliff has been played in the past by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy. Who are all, it goes without saying, very white. But that was then and this is now, and the matter of Heathcliff’s race clearly trumps all other points of discussion. Ethnic accuracy is paramount, and Fennell is clearly a monster who should have cast Dev Patel.

Has she even read the book, people asked. The question is: have they? Elordi is of Spanish descent (his father is Basque): do they realise this is one of Heathcliff’s possible origins? And while you could counter-argue that the Victorian inability to tell American, Spanish and Southeast Asian ethnicities apart (as per the quote from the novel above) is appalling – and we should not base our interpretation of character on such racist ideals – isn’t that exactly what puritan readers are suggesting we do? That we stay true, to a fault, to what Emily Brontë wrote?

Elordi is an exceptional actor, capable of unbelievably powerful performances, and far from just a pretty face (read: the hottest man currently roaming the earth).

This is no different to people being up in arms about “miscasting” Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton, Halle Bailey in the live action remake of the Little Mermaid or Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein, which required makeup artists to – how can I put this? – exaggerate his nose. We need to allow artistic licence where reasonable, and casting a hunky Australian whose English accent is on par with Gwyneth Paltrow’s, in an era where makeup artists can age an actor with remarkable verisimilitude, seems reasonable enough. (Although the accent he’ll need to pull off for Heathcliff is quite different from the one he mastered for Felix, it must be said.)

None of this even begins to address the single most important point: that Elordi is an exceptional actor, capable of unbelievably powerful performances, and far from just a pretty face (read: the hottest man currently roaming the earth).

As far as Heathcliff’s otherness is concerned: yes, it is an important part of his character. But the beauty of art – and of a 177-year-old tale of pure fiction – is that the creator (in this case, Fennell) can (and should) be afforded freedom to express that otherness as they see fit. The answer to the Elordi-not-being-a-gypsy conundrum might be found in what former Heathcliff Tom Hardy did with Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. “Bane, quintessentially, is Latinx in origin and I’m not,” Hardy told Wired when the Christopher Nolan film came out in 2012. “So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a man called Bartley Gorman, who’s a Romani gypsy. The king of the gypsies, in inverted commas, and a bare-knuckle fighter and a boxer.” He remoulded the movie’s villain to fit an image that he could pull off, and his accent and portrayal garnered plaudits.

The truth is, had Fennell chosen a Southeast Asian actor to play Heathcliff, people would still be up in arms that she hadn't cast one of Roma origin. And vice versa. I think the idea of Margot Robbie as Cathy is just plain silly – not because she’s too old, as some have suggested, but because she’s too Hollywood. Too perfect, too symmetrical, too Bottega. That, and the fact that her production company is behind the film, which suggests the sort of unfair monopoly on par with Google paying Apple $20bn to make them the default search engine on the iPhone.

But as for the outrage over Elordi: this is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. My advice to Fennell: ignore the backlash. And get Kate Bush to do the soundtrack. (William Hosie)

A contributor to Plough discusses Jane Eyre and free will.

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will.”

These are words spoken by Jane Eyre in the midst of a climactic moment in the novel that bears her name.

Stripped from their context, the words – written nearly two centuries ago – still resound. They are bold. Brave. Strong. Compassionating. But within the context of the narrative, the words – spoken to the man Jane loves but will give up in order to choose her own integrity over love – are even more astonishing.

In the world of Jane Eyre (published by Charlotte Brontë in 1847), the titular character is as helpless, powerless, and socially inconsequential as a person in her world could be. In this context, it is no less than revolutionary for a poor, friendless, servant – and a woman, no less – to claim for herself, as she does with the words above, her freedom, identity, and sheer sense of self. (Truth be told, such is still revolutionary in some spaces in the world today.) Orphaned, rejected by her few known relations, and utterly alone in the world, Jane rejects the man who loves her, woos her, and betrays her – despite the fact that Rochester’s power as Jane’s employer, protector, and social superior could give much of what she lacks and needs.

At this point in the narrative, we have journeyed with Jane through the physical and emotional abuse she endured as a small child living in the home of her cruel aunt and equally cruel cousins. We have witnessed the despicable hypocrisy of the Christian overseers and funders of the charity school where Jane is sent as a child, an institution run so poorly that some of its students die from illness and neglect. We have cheered Jane as she manages to survive and, even more miraculously, encounters for the first time in her life real agape love, twice, in fact, in the forms of a friend and a kind teacher. (Karen Swallow Prior) (Read more)

The Minnesota Star Tribune also has a letter from a reader on how Jane Eyre is still relevant.

‘Jane Eyre,’ unrelatable? Since when?

Eva Lockhart says that she would never teach “Jane Eyre” or “Pride and Prejudice” to 16-year-olds (”Kids can still get hooked on the classics,” Strib Voices, Sept. 27). I read “Jane Eyre” in sixth grade (at age 11). That story of the unloved, unwanted, bullied little girl who was far from beautiful resonated more with me than anything else I had ever read. Sixty years later it is still the book I love the best. “Not a universal text”? “Particular to a limited audience”? I don’t agree.

Elaine Murray, Minneapolis

Anyway, it's October now, the time for all things spooky, and so there's a column on 'The unseen ghost in Rebecca' on MovieJawn.

Maxim resembles Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, the 1847 classic by Charlotte Brontë, which Rebecca parallels. Some regard du Maurier’s novel as an adaptation of Brontë’s, though the author disagrees. She did not intend to invoke Jane Eyre, in which a young orphan finds out that the rich older man who proposed to her already has a sham marriage with a psychotic woman living in the attic. Oopsie! (Or did she  actually suffer from exploitation, not mental illness? See Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea and the 1993 movie adaptation.) Rebecca is like a spectral retelling of Jane Eyre where the madwoman in the attic becomes the ghost of the first Mrs. de Winter.

From echoes of Jane Eyre to Hitchcock’s only gay woman, there is a lot going on in Rebecca. It keeps the movie interesting nearly 85 years after its release. If you have not seen it yet, give it a watch! Let me know what you think of Mrs. Danvers, how the protagonist compares with Jane Eyre, and how her romance with Maxim measures up in the twenty-first century. (Melissa Strong)

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Adapting Jane Eyre

A new example of recent Brontë scholarship:

Adapting Jane Eyre

Alexander Greenhough, Stanford University, USA

The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory Volume 5, Issue 1, August 2024

What does Jane Eyre look like? That is: her face, her expressions. In the character’s own assessment, she’s “plain.” Rather than providing a detailed description, Charlotte Brontë offers a subjective judgment, prompting readers to consider the use of first-person narration, and its effect on their feelings for, and identification with, a fictional person. Widely, continuously, and deeply read across generations in numerous editions, versions, and translations, Brontë’s immensely popular novel is, as one critic puts it, a “classic classic” (Hopkins 54). The eponymous heroine and Rochester have been reimagined many times in the mind’s eye from the page. The pair have also been depicted visually, proliferating over decades in illustrations, book covers, theatrical and operatic productions, and on millions of screens.

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Outwitted by Emily Brontë

The Guardian has an article on 'cinema’s long love affair with Wuthering Heights'.

When Andrea Arnold imagined the opening shots of her film of Wuthering Heights, she saw heavy mists ­swirling around the outline of a misshapen creature as it scaled a hillside. The figure would slowly be revealed as a climbing man, his back laden with dead rabbits for skinning.

On the day of the shoot, however, it was bright and sunny – and there were only three rabbits. “People keep saying one day I will come to like it,” she said later of her 2011 screen version. “It was a difficult experience making it, for various reasons. I find it hard to look at it.”

Arnold is not alone in feeling outwitted by Emily Brontë’s stirring 1847 novel. Wuthering Heights does that to directors. It is a gothic story that roams so wildly in the minds of readers that putting it out into the real world can seem diminishing, or even crass. It is not just the ferocity of the storytelling required, or the tricky handling of supernatural forces, but the central relationship itself. For modern film-makers, the question has become whether this violent narrative is now too dark to deal with, and whether its bullying romantic lead, Heathcliff, is too hot to handle. [...]

Many complained that Robbie, who has lately stalked the globe as Barbie, is not right to play the raven-haired teenager [Cathy's hair is brown, 'brown ringlets'] of the book and that Elordi is too conventionally good-looking for Heathcliff. Some were also angry that he is not the right ethnicity to play a character described in the book as “a dark-skinned Gypsy” who looks like a “lascar” (a slang term for a south Asian sailor), “or an American or Spanish castaway”.

A decade ago, Arnold dodged these accusations of “white-washing” by casting the first non-white actor, James Howson, in the role. In contrast, screenwriter Peter Bowker, who wrote his TV film of the book in 2009, felt the term “Gypsy” was more likely a 19th-century stereotype for an outsider, rather than being meant as a literal characteristic. “There was certainly a growing fear of the ‘other’ in Victorian England and a number of urban myths about ‘cuckoos in the nest’ – strays or orphans that were brought into the family who then consumed it,” he said.

The Brontë expert Sharon Wright is actively enjoying the new fuss. “I think it is brilliant that people are still talking about this book – and with as much intensity as they were 200 yeas ago. Reviewers back then attacked its ‘brutal cruelty and unnatural love’ and looked down on its ‘vulgar depravity’. Poor Emily never saw a good review.”

Wright’s own new book, The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar, about the buildings described in the novels written by Emily and her two literary sisters Charlotte and Anne, comes out next year and was written together with Ann Dinsdale, who works at the trust now run from the three sisters’ former parsonage home in Haworth.

The characters in Wuthering Heights, Wright believes, will always be much harder to represent on film than the houses Brontë described or the wind-blown Yorkshire landscape: “Heathcliff really is a creation that lives only in the reader’s mind’s eye. Brontë is deliberately ambiguous about him.”

But Heathcliff is unlikely to be Fennell’s only problem. She will also need to decide how much of the rain-lashed saga to tell. Several earlier screen versions cut off the story before it gets too self-reflective. But, as Bowker admitted after his version was released, no matter how bravely you take a scythe to the lengthy text, there are certain key lines that a film-maker ought not to sidestep. “At first I thought this is going to be such an easy gig, because the language is so wonderful,” he told fans of the novel. “But then I started writing it out and realised very little of it works as dialogue because it is so heightened and poetic. So I wanted to preserve some of that quality, and there are classic lines, such as Cathy’s ‘I am Heathcliff’, which really you cannot lose.” Only Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 version, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, gets credit from Brontë enthusiasts for telling the whole unruly tale.

The tragedy of Wuthering Heights, for those still wondering what Kate Bush has been singing about all this time, revolves around the bootless love between Catherine and her Heathcliff, an adopted orphan boy found starving on the streets of Liverpool. The destructive relationship between these two, who find no way to express or fulfil their yearnings, is its gloomy core. For Bowker the point of the story was this “impossible passion”. “I don’t know my Freud well enough to speculate,” he said, “but there is something very fixed and unchanging about their passion which is both entrancing and terrifying.”

Perhaps the most glamorous portrayal of these central lovers is a black-and-white 1939 screen version. A tousle-haired young Laurence Olivier plays the wayward Heathcliff and the striking Hollywood pin-up Merle Oberon is Cathy. While it does have its longueurs, this film is probably the reason that a string of other film-makers have repeatedly hoped to rise to the challenge. It created a turbulent visual template that is hard to forget, even for those who do not know the book.

The other screen outing on the wild and windy moor that remains popular with audiences today is one that starred a pre-007 Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff and Anna Calder-Marshall as Cathy. Made in 1970, it was a box-office success and still has ardent admirers, although it also stops halfway through the original plot and leaves out two pivotal scenes: first, the devastating moment when Heathcliff overhears Cathy dismissing him, and then her later ghostly manifestation at his window.

An uncomplicated pleasure of Brontë’s enduring love story is the clever character names she chose. “Heathcliff” is so evocative, as is the name of the home that gives the book its title. And the three Brontë sisters had reason to understand the importance of a name. Not only is Charlotte’s plain Jane Eyre the perfect foil to her roistering Mr Rochester, but the authors themselves had to invent male names for themselves to avoid embarrassing their family and to pass muster in the wider world of publishing. So Charlotte temporarily became Currer Bell, Anne was Acton Bell and Emily, Ellis Bell.

Wright is also someone who recognises the value of using the right name. Last week she celebrated the success of her campaign to get the spelling of the Brontës’ surname corrected in Westminster Abbey, where a wall plaque in Poets’ Corner commemorates the three writers’ lives. Their surnames had been carved in stone without the two dots over the “e”, known as a diaeresis, that denote the emphasis they placed on the final vowel.

Contemplating the amended memorial this weekend, Wright is sure of one thing: “I do think Emily would be absolutely delighted that we are still trying to figure out Heathcliff. We all have our own vision in our heads and I am really looking forward to seeing Emerald Fennell’s.” (Vanessa Thorpe)

We are enjoying the fact that X's dime-a-dozen experts are now being replaced by people who actually know what it's all about, which in this particular case is 'no one really knows'. A contributor to UnHerd makes the same point--that Heathcliff is left to the reader's imagination.

It is a revelation to me that the rigid consensus around the “race” and ethnic origins of Heathcliff, the Byronic protagonist of Emily Brontë’s legendary Yorkshire Gothic tale, Wuthering Heights, was that he was definitely a “person of colour” — meaning someone of non-European descent, most likely black Sub-Saharan African.

Whenever I’ve read the novel, first at school, and multiple times since, my interpretation has been that Heathcliff was something closer to Romani gypsy origin, and thus would’ve looked more like a saturnine Mediterranean than a Sub-Saharan African or a “half-caste”, to use the arcane 19th century term.

The backlash to the casting of Australian actor Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation from critics on social media demonstrates how firm this consensus is. Volleys of “she obviously hasn’t read the book” and “the story is being whitewashed” have been launched toward Fennell. In the background is clearly the issue of representation of “ethnic minorities” in classical literature. This is why period dramas now are increasingly cast to make the England of the past look like the multiethnic England of present. While understandable, there is a tendency for this to spill over into absolutist claims which ironically become rather racially essentialist — like “Heathcliff is black”.

Despite describing him as having dark skin, dark eyes and dark hair, Bronte leaves Heathcliff’s precise racial and ethnic background rather vague and ambiguous. There is speculation that he might be “a little Lascar, or American or Spanish castaway”. However, it is never stated plainly where he is from, other than that he was a foundling discovered in Liverpool by Mr. Earnshaw, who raised him. Indeed, the enigmatic origins are precisely part of the point of Heathcliff as a character. It enhances his mystique as a wild and exotic Byronic hero, a tortured soul who is “mad, bad and dangerous to know”.

This means, naturally, there is a scope of interpretation for Heathcliff’s “identity”. The theory that he is black or a “person of colour” stems from the fact that throughout the 18th century Liverpool was among the biggest slave trading ports within the British empire. So, Heathcliff might have been the product of an illicit interracial dalliance — possibly involving Mr. Earnshaw himself — and then thrown out onto the streets. Thus, the hostility and exclusion he endures is basically racism.

It’s plausible. But if he was canonically black then I suspect his enemies, given the era, would’ve gleefully stressed his “negro” origins.

It’s not outrageous that Jacob Elordi (who has Basque ancestry on his father’s side) would be cast as Heathcliff. Neither was it wrong for the 2011 adaptation to have a mixed-race Heathcliff, because it leans into the ambiguity and fits in with contemporary understanding of difference — it still exemplified the “otherness” of the character. Shakespeare’s works have been “race blended” like this many times, and few blink an eye because what is important is not the precise race of the actor, but the role they fulfil.

As a “person of colour”, it doesn’t offend me that Emily Brontë probably had in mind someone who looked more like Russell Brand or Colin Farrell than myself when imagining Heathcliff. I don’t feel “excluded”, because I feel connected to these characters irrespective of race or phenotype.

Regrettably, our culture labours under the condescending misapprehension that in order for ethnic minorities to connect with the classics of the English canon, they necessarily have to see themselves represented in the story by people who “look like them”. This treats literature not as a humanist enterprise — where we enter into a universal conversation through characters that are very much not “like us” — but more a form of ancestor worship. It is a regrettable development in modern culture, and one that should be resisted. (Ralph Leonard)

Reader's Digest recommends '35 Inspiring Biographies Everyone Should Read' and one of them is

The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects by Deborah Lutz

For fans of: A Memoir of Jane Austen: And Other Family Recollections by James Edward Austen-Leigh

Perhaps three of the most famous sisters in literary history, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë have delighted and awed readers with their collective works for nearly 200 years. That fascination continues in this 2015 biography by Deborah Lutz, which comes recommended by biographer Natalie Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College and the author of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner.

“The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects brilliantly reveals the inner lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë by taking up, in detail, nine objects in their household, including tiny handmade books, needlework items and a bracelet of entwined hair,” Dykstra says. “Lutz’s plunge into the ‘private lives of objects’ brings the sisters incredibly close through the things they touched and used in their daily lives. So we get to see Charlotte reciting poetry while her fingers are busy with a patchwork quilt; Emily, whom Charlotte described as ‘a solitude-loving raven,’ out on her beloved Yorkshire moors with her walking stick; Anne writing poetry on her portable desk that carried papers, letters, seals, ink and writing pens. Lutz’s unforgettable account is a reminder that objects can also resurrect the ‘daily living and breathing’ of biographical subjects.” (Tria Wen)

While Town and Country recommends the '20 Best Gothic Novels to Read on a Gloomy Autumn Night' and two of them are

Wuthering Heights

Set on the bleak Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights follows the love story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Emily Brontë infuses her storytelling with many gothic elements, including the supernatural, aristocrats, and the gloomy aesthetic. Plus, there's currently a Wuthering Heights adaptation in the works, so now is the perfect time to read (or re-read) the classic. [...]

Jane Eyre

"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day" begins Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, a novel that is firmly in the gothic tradition. Jane Eyre follows the story of Jane, from her perspective, as she grows up and falls for the mysterious Rochester. (Emily Burack)

BBC Radio Leeds invited Martina Devlin to speak about her novel, Charlotte. AnneBrontë.org discusses 'Aunt Branwell And The Brontës In Brussels'.

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Classic Film Scores

This is a reissue of a historical recording of classical movie scores which includes a track from Erich Wolfgang Korngold soundtrack of Devotion 1946 and another one from Alfred Newman's for Wuthering Heights 1939:

Charles Gerhardt Conducts Classic Film Scores (Sony Classical Masters Series)

National Philharmonic/Charles Gerhardt

John Alldis Choir, The Ambrosian Singers

, 

Sony 592064

The Death of Emily Bronte (From 'Devotion')

Cathy's Theme (From 'Wuthering Heights')

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Irish Diaresis

The Westminster Abbey's dot affair is still commented all around the news:

Those two dots, known as a diaresis, have long since disappeared, but this week we can celebrate their return in a very specific place: a memorial plaque at Westminster Abbey to the Brontë sisters. Thanks to the Brontë Society, the names on the plaque, 85 years after they were first inscribed, are dotless no more. At a time when many of our punctuation marks seem to be on a juggernaut to extinction, the move feels like a soothing recognition of their past importance.

The diaresis – which takes its name from the Greek for “taking apart” and which is used to indicate where a vowel should be pronounced separately – was part of the only spelling of their name that Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë ever knew. Their father, Patrick, had changed his surname of Prunty or Brunty when he arrived at Cambridge in 1802, although no one is quite sure why. Perhaps it was to achieve greater sophistication, or simply to aid pronunciation, but his rebranding certainly proved positive for his future family. (...)

Quite what the Brontë sisters would have thought of such evolution is anyone’s guess, but the restoration of their proper name shows that we can preserve the past whilst still embracing the future. (Susie Dent in iNews)

And inshorts, Euronews, Associated Press, Newser, ianVisits, La Razón (Spain), infobae (Argentina), El Noticiero Universal (Argentina), Terrafemina (France)...

The other hot topic on Brontë news is still Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights project. The cast is discussed in Cinemablend, Cultureless, Into... which repeat the usual flat electroencephalogram noise. The Irish Times, on the other hand, has a more interesting opinion:

It is, however, something else that has really got the internet in a fury. In recent years there has been much discussion about Heathcliff’s ethnicity. The vast majority of actors cast in the role have been white: Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, Cliff Richard (no, really). Yet the text boils with something like racial othering. Heathcliff is described as “a dark-skinned gypsy” and compared to a “lascar”, a word for an Indian or Asian sailor. One might counter that elsewhere his face is “as white as the wall behind him”, but it remains reasonable to admit the possibility that Heathcliff was a person of colour.

Preparing her innovative, underappreciated 2011 adaptation, Andrea Arnold initially looked for an actor from the UK’s Romani community but eventually settled on a black performer named James Howson. Though the reactionary blowhards hadn’t yet fastened on to the word “woke”, they had “PC gone mad” to throw back in the film-makers’ faces. Counterarguments quoted the references above and convinced the open-minded that such an interpretation was reasonable.

A decade is a long time in discourse. The online response this week confirmed that a large swathe of the commentariat has moved from allowing the possibility that Heathcliff is black to an assertion that he is, to quote one X user, “canonically Bipoc” (which stands for black, indigenous and person of colour). Heathcliff “is described as a black/mixed race man”, someone else overclaimed. There was a lot more where that came from. Heathcliff is, it seems, now as black as Othello. Olivier playing Brontë’s creation in 1939 is, perhaps, no less a transgression than his blacking up for Shakespeare’s “Moor” in 1965. How did that happen? (...)

It would be a more boring world if we were all in agreement. And we are better off leaning into oversensitivity than blithely accepting discriminatory representation. But let us at least admit ambiguity into the conversation. Heathcliff could well have been Irish. He was found in Liverpool, you know. (Donald Clarke)

B.D. McClay's column in The New York Times discusses Sally Rooney's works and persona:

This tendency to conflate female novelists with their characters, and to misunderstand them as being somehow incapable of the imaginative work of novel-writing, long predates Ms. Rooney. In 1850, when Charlotte Brontë revealed that Ellis Bell, the purported author of “Wuthering Heights,” was in fact her late sister Emily, an immediate question arose that hadn’t occurred to anyone to ask about Mr. Bell: Where in the world did she get these crazy ideas? How could a sheltered young woman have come up with such a bizarre story?

The simplest answer — that Emily Brontë simply made her book up — seemed scarcely plausible. No, she must have had a dramatic love affair nobody knew about, or she was some sort of passive vessel of inspiration, or perhaps her brother, Branwell, was the writer — all arguments that echoed the notion that Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary, really wrote “Frankenstein.”

The Guardian has a selection of this season's key fashion collections. Describing a piece by Chloe, a Brontë reference drops out:

Town and country

Embrace your Brontë heroine out on the moors, with an ankle-skimming tweed coat. Cape coat, top and knitted shorts, over-the-knee boots and bag. (Jo Jones) 

We are not sure if this really applies to the Brontës.  But the Financial Times says:

It’s no secret that many great artists were set upon their creative journeys via convalescence, or following a period in which they spent huge chunks of time alone. The Brontë sisters, Frida Kahlo, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell and Marcel Proust were all confined to bed or remote locations, often for spells during childhood, and it has been argued that this shaped the unique way in which they saw the world. (Jo Ellison)

Times Nows News recommends classic novels going from "Easy Reads to Literary Heavyweights":

7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

'Jane Eyre' is a compelling blend of romance, mystery, and social critique, following the life of its titular heroine from her harsh childhood to her stormy romance with the enigmatic Mr. Rochester. Brontë’s evocative prose, combined with Jane’s strong, independent voice, make the novel engaging, though it does demand more attention to its rich language and detailed narrative. The novel’s deep exploration of themes like love, morality, and social class solidifies its status as a classic worth the effort. (...)

9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This dark, passionate novel tells the story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, whose destructive love and vengeance haunt the isolated moors of Yorkshire. Brontë’s complex narrative structure, with its shifts in time and perspective, adds layers of intrigue but requires careful reading. The novel’s intense emotions, gothic atmosphere, and exploration of human cruelty and redemption make it a challenging yet deeply impactful read, leaving a lasting impression on those who brave its stormy narrative. (Girish Shukla)

SoloLibri (Italy) discusses the poem Fall, Leaves, Fall by Emily Brontë.

"Fall, Leaves, Fall” è il titolo originale di questo celebre componimento di Emily Brontë che si presenta come una ninnananna di autunno, un canto crepuscolare delle cose che finiscono. Una filastrocca in rima, quasi un presagio di felicità. Ecco che nella vibrante cantilena di Fall, Leaves, Fall avvertiamo lo stesso sinistro e sibilante sussurro che anima Wuthering Heights, Cime tempestose, in cui si avvera il desiderio di Heathcliff. (Alice Figini) (Translation)

Villains we love in BuzzFeed (Germany):

Heathcliff – „Sturmhöhe“ von Emily Brontë

Heathcliff aus Sturmhöhe ist der tragische Antiheld, dessen finstere Pläne und Rachegelüste das Leben derer, die er einst geliebt hat, zerstören. Sein Herz wurde so oft gebrochen, dass er selbst zu einem gebrochenen, grausamen Menschen wurde. (Florian Menzel) (Translation)

Quotes for your "little man" in Parade, including one by Anne Brontë. 

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